CAMERA RAW AND LIGHTROOM MASK REFINEMENT

THE BEST WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR MASKS IN LIGHTROOM AND CAMERA RAW
This article is applicable to both Lightroom and ACR (Adobe Camera Raw), as they all use the same processing. (I’m using Lightroom Classic 2022 for this; earlier versions are incompatible.)

Take a look at the sky and tree line in this picture. It’s challenging for the AI to get a clean mask on edges like those of these trees.

In the develop module, Choose the mask button (the dotted circle)

Choose select sky

The sky is selected. We want to adjust the dark foreground and not the sky so press the ‘ key or click the 3dots next to Mask and choose invert.

Now the foreground is selected.

Brighten up the foreground with exposure and shadow recovery.

You will notice its pretty good, but you can see that the edges of the trees aren’t perfect

Here’s how to make those edges better.

Click on the 3 dots by Sky and choose “Intersect with..” Luminance range

Intersect will only show the areas that 2 masks overlap.

Turn on Show luminance map in the mask adjustment panel

If you drag the luminance range slider from the left it excludes shadows (red is the masked area)

To omit highlights, drag to the right.

Slide the slider till the edges are appealing. Because it intersects with the ground, the sky is unimportant; only the boundaries are important.

Turn off Show luminance map in the mask adjustment panel

Make adjustments with the slider until it looks good (the video above demonstrates this well).

Grad the inner slider to fine tune the mask.

It should look pretty good now.

If there are any areas that you want to manually fix, choose add or subtract (depending if you want to add to the mask, or remove part of it) and choose the brush.